Place looks great. Washed the windows. Cleaned out the pipes to the taps. Polished the mahogany.

Anything happen while I was gone?

Truly, spending a week as a consumer of news is an enlightening thing if, by "enlightening," you mean the high-pitched squeal of someone who finds a Gaboon viper hiding atop the chiffarobe. You have to step away from the presidential campaign to realize what an incredible dumbshow the whole thing has become. He, Trump spent the week reaching out to black people in front of halls full of white people. (I spent five years in Milwaukee, and I know from the difference between Milwaukee and West Bend.) Then he went to Louisiana and handed out Play-Doh for 29 minutes. Then he started making noises about softening his views on immigration—No Big Beautiful Wall with a Big Beautiful Door?—which would make his entire campaign to this point a complete and utter sham.

OK, more of one.

This all came about because he also blew up his campaign staff again. Out went boyar-for-hire Paul Manafort and in came the Cryptkeeper at Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable and a Green Room D-Lister who first became famous as one of several interchangeable talking heads during the Great Penis Chase of the 1990s. Kellyanne Conway didn't ascend as rapidly as did, say, Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham, but she's Queen of Bandini Mountain now. (She was so involved in the GPC that she ended up married to one of the "elves," the cabal of lawyers who plotted against the first Clinton presidency.) Back in her performance heyday, Conway once referred to how Hillary Rodham Clinton might send Barack Obama to "the back of the bus." I do so despair once again of the rebranding.

By far, however, the major change in the campaign of El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago was its sudden attachment to the notion that HRC is suffering from an amazing panoply of fatal illnesses. The airwaves were full of doctors making long-range diagnoses. These included Dr. Sean Hannity and, most recently, renowned neurologist Dr. Rudy Giuliani.

Once again, however, it is important to note that none of this is new to Republican politics. Sunny optimist Ronald Reagan once joked about Michael Dukakis's having been "an invalid" when Lee Atwater was spreading rumors about Dukakis's mental competency during the latter's campaign against Poppy Bush. And who can forget Dr. Hannity's towering performance in the case of Terri Schiavo, where he consulted with an amazing array of hacks and quacks in order to point out to America that, very soon, Schiavo would be competing in Ironman Triathlons.

In the meantime, on the other side, the HRC campaign may have pushed Colin Powell one step too far on this whole private e-mail server business. Per CNN:

The former Secretary of State under President George W. Bush suggested that Clinton was using private email long before he communicated with her about the subject. "The truth is, she was using (the private email server) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did," Powell said.

At this point, the whole e-mail business is nothing more or less than gum on the campaign's shoe. The campaign press, of course, is slavering for a press conference so it can grill her for an hour or so about the gum on her campaign's shoe, which is probably the reason why she hasn't had one in quite some time. (Pro Tip: candidates are not obligated in any way to have press conferences.) Meanwhile, Trump's tax returns remain in a locked vault beneath what's left of the Taj in Atlantic City. These returns, I suspect, are not gum on the campaign's shoe but a millstone tied around the campaign's ankle.

Of course, the conservative floundering about the Republican presidential nominee is becoming more frenzied as the water reaches their chin. Tiger Beat On The Potomac ran an interesting profile of Charlie Sykes, a Milwaukee radio talker who is getting a lot of run on TV because of his opposition to the Trump candidacy. Sykes, along with a guy named Mark Belling, who is a real prize and makes Sykes sound like Winston Churchill, have been critical to creating the divisive political climate in which Scott Walker has prospered while destroying Wisconsin's legacy of progressive politics, as Alec McGillis pointed out in his lucid analysis of Wisconsin politics two years ago.

Anyway, Sykes seems a bit unnerved. Via TBOTP:

Since last year, the most influential political talk show host in Wisconsin has found out just how hard it is to be a #NeverTrump conservative on right-wing radio. Ever since Sykes began denouncing Donald Trump on the air—which he does just about every time he talks about the presidential election—he's strained his relationships with the listeners of his daily radio show…"You're comparing American citizens, Muslims, to rabid dogs," Sykes responds.

"No, I'm saying, they're talking about phasing out the breed because so many are bad. No one wants to phase out poodles! I mean, there's no Lutherans doing this! We never know when one of these people are going to be radicalized." "One of these people," says Sykes. Sykes ends the call. He's silent, broadcasting dead air. He looks upset, like he's stopped breathing. He goes to a commercial break. "OK, that doesn't happen very often," he says off-air. "I'm not usually absolutely speechless." He says his listeners never talked like this until recently. "Were these people that we actually thought were our allies?" he asks.

Just. Please. Shut. The. Hell. Up.

Just asking that question marks Sykes as either a charlatan or a fool, and my money's on the former. Sykes knew damn well who his "allies" were when he was calling the First Lady "Mooch," or when he was calling a black man who'd died in police custody "a piece of garbage," and when he referred to "the pigs of motherswho are too lazy to put their children in a crib and roll over the top of them while sleeping on a futon on the floor."

Sykes knew who his "allies" were when, as Milwaukee's Shepherd Expressreported, he aired a blackface rap parody.

It features a young, black woman calling herself Chapter Jackson, who acts out every racist stereotype of poor, black, single mothers that bigoted audiences find hilarious. Ms. Jackson is knee-deep in black babies in a house full of women slutted up like prostitutes while she writhes and raps that her life is a constant party paid for by taxpayers. She repeats the obscene refrain: "All you have to do is f— and nine months later you get in the big bucks."

Yeah, he's known all along who his "allies" are. Once again, Trump is merely the modern Republican party without its interior monologue.

In local news, I regret to inform you that baby Jeebus does not love me enough to make this actually happen. My guess is that Curt will chicken out the same way he turtled before Congress after running his mouth about PED's. But, in case he doesn't, from the man's own blog, here are the bare bones of his platform.

First, he's not the racist retweeting racist memes, you are. Second, Curt owns a dictionary. Third, the spectacular crash of 38 Studios was Lincoln Chaffee's fault, not his. Fourth, Curt does not know the difference between "diddy" and "ditty." Fifth, Curt is 56 percent Western European. Sixth, Curt doesn't know the difference between being in the majority and the minority in the U.S. Senate in 2016. (Pro Tip: the majority wants to do nothing and has the votes to do it.) There's more, too.

Seventh, Curt doesn't understand how raising the minimum wage will work but he has mad math skillz that Lincoln Chaffee, that gutless loser, wouldn't let him use to save his doomed company. But, the real stuff is when he starts discussing the threat to the homeland, Curt being one of the most prominent fake Army-men we have. He also believes everything he sees on the Intertoobz.

I laugh when these dumb asses try to retort with a "Wow, Yavapai Jr College" as a comeback. I know more history than every single student interviewed at these three universities combined.

I laugh when somebody makes "dumbasses" two words. And speaking of Curt's deep knowledge of history, there's this.

You understand we are at war right? Our President offered to 'help with the investigation' over in France. Well golly gee. Why are we having an investigation? Did we launch an investigation when Pearl Harbor was bombed? Nope, we declared war and managed to kill enough of them before they killed enough of us. War sucks. But in a world where a group of people want EVERYONE who does not follow their ideology dead, it's an only option.

I'm not sure, but I'll bet there's a history major at Texas Tech who could tell Curt, who knows more history than the history major does, that FDR indeed did launch an investigation when the Germa…er, sorry…Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was called the Roberts Commission and it began in December, 1941 and lasted almost a year. It was a pretty shoddy investigation, but it was an investigation. As to the latter part of Curt's disquisition, he seems to have availed himself of every option to avoid going to war his own self.

Also, "It's an only option" is not English. It's close, but it's not English.

Meanwhile, Curt sees the Saracens at the gates and he's sounding the damn alarm. (When career hysteric Steve Emerson first floated the notion of 700 "no-go zones" in France, and of sharia law infiltrating the UK, David Cameron called Emerson "a complete idiot.") Can someone please tell Curt that he doesn't live in Bangladesh?

All of you head in the sand folks please read the following. And understand that in no place, no section, no area, no line word or paragraph, is Sharia Law compliant with our Constitution. You know, the document our founding fathers drafted to create this nation? Almost every aspect of Sharia Law violates federal law and/or an Amendment in the Bill of Rights. You know that document that laid out what we as citizens were entitled to?

No, I don't know what he's on about, either.

Later, though, Curt does get into screaming in ALL CAPS and IN BOLD FACE, TOO. Fighting a two-font war against the encroaching caliphate, I guess. I would like to encourage Curt in this endeavor. I think he should run against an immensely popular incumbent Democratic senator in Massachusetts as a Trumpian xenophobe, as a mouthpiece for a paranoid view of the world, as a climate-change denialist, as an opponent both of the minimum wage and of making college more affordable, and that his entire campaign should focus on what his opponent put on a form 30 years ago.

Do it, Curt. A nation desperate for comedy demands it.

As to more pleasant athletic pursuits, the Olympics pretty much saved my soul. (Live sports on my phone in the daytime!) The two gold-medalists for coverage, to my mind anyway, were Bruce Arthur from The Toronto Star and Sally Jenkins from The Washington Post. Both of them walked deftly down the line of celebrating what needed to be celebrated and deploring what needed to be deplored. (Ryan Lochte may not get Jenkins's bootprints off his forehead for years.) And, if nothing else, the Games were the greatest advertisement in favor of Title IX we've ever had. Thanks, Dick!

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